Formal Comment
the submitter's name: Michael Sperber The submitter's email address: sperber at deinprogramm.de the draft version of the report: draft 6 a one-sentence summary of the issue: The denotational semantics is inadequate a full description of the issue:
The denotational semantics in the draft, which seems to be copied from R5RS, is inadequate for helping to describe those parts of the semantics where the semantics is especially tricky, especially evaluation order and `dynamic-wind'. This is a pity, especially as there's an R5RS version of the semantics in R6RS:
http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/~jacobm/pubs/scheme-semantics.pdf
Moreover, there is a version of the denotational semantics that does include `dynamic-wind' in this paper:
Martin Gasbichler, Eric Knauel, Michael Sperber Richard A. Kelsey: How to Add Threads to a Sequential Language Without Getting Tangled Up, In The 2003 Scheme Workshop, Boston, Ma., October 2003.
http://www.deinprogramm.de/sperber/papers/adding-threads.pdf
(I'd be happy to supply LaTeX if anybody is interested.)
PS: This is a general issue with the draft - the R6RS document contains many improvements of the description of the language that are not about changes in the language. (To name two other prominent examples: the distinction and relationship between numbers and the objects that represent them, and the description of the syntax with respect to macros. Especially embarrassing is the pointer to the Indiana Scheme repository, which has not been maintained for something like 14 years.) Many parts of R7RS are throwbacks to the old, inferior wording.